I'm working on a paper about units of analysis for the Internet. It's based on a 1996 paper by John December in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. The fundamental question the papers address is what do we mean when we say that we are studying a particular aspect of Internet communication? Let's say someone wants to understand the role blogs play in building communities. It would be very important to know just what the researcher was talking about. Are they referring to all blogs, one blog in particular, a genre of blogs, the technology behind a particular blog, or the common interface characteristics of all blogs?

A document's medium may be described as “the means by which we share knowledge and experience over time and distance" (David Farkas, Professor, TC). It's the transmission technology, delivery vehicle, and presentation method. How do we distinguish between this blog as a document and this blog as a medium? What do we need to say about the technology? Do we need to discuss TCP/IP protocols? Does it matter to the reader whether this blog is transmitted over the Internet, phone lines, or wireless? To some extent, method of transmittal certainly does as the transmission technology affects this document's accessibility. Does it matter if this blog is running Linux or Windows Server? To the systems administrator it does, but probably not to you, the reader. The point is that transmission technology is more or less important dependent on the context, but it is never irrelevant. Generally, the end-user's experience is dependent on the format, behaviors and features of the user interface. Granted, the format, behaviors, and features of the UI is dependent on the backend technology. But, this blog could be duplicated on a number of different hardware configurations, running any variety of web server software, and because of this blog's minimal feature set; differences in functionality would be negligible across browsers and browser versions. Most telling, this blog could have been published using technology from the mid-nineties. What does that tell us about the importance of technology with regard to document's medium? On the one hand, technology cannot be divorced from a definition of medium, on the other, technology hardly seems to matter.

The problem can be summed up asking, when I say "this blog" what do I mean exactly? Am I referring to the text of the document? The collection of blog entries by Janet and Edward, the application used to author, publish, and manage entries (the blog software, Nucleus CMS v 3.22), the server that this blog is running on, the client you are using to read it, or some combination of the above? Given that you are reading this, the context would tell you that I am referring to the content of this entry dated 11 December 2005. However, if you were conducting research on blogs you would want to be more specific. Let's say you wanted to ascertain how much time a population spent on blogs? You'd need to specify what you meant. Do you mean writing entries? Responding to entries? Modifying the layout? Administering the blog software? Writing new blog software? Maintaining the servers?

Well, back to the real thing. Wish me luck.